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My father Cecil Banks Mullis and mother, formerly Bernice Alberta Barker grew up in rural North Carolina in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My dad’s family had a general store, which I never saw. My grandparents on his side had already died before I started noticing things. My mother’s parents were close to…

Svante August Arrhenius was born on February 19, 1859, the son of Svante Gustaf Arrhenius and Carolina Christina Thunberg. His ancestors were farmers; his uncle became Professor of Botany and Rector of the Agricultural High School at Ultuna near Uppsala and later Secretary of The Swedish Academy of Agriculture. His father was a land surveyor…

Petrus (Peter) Josephus Wilhelmus Debye was born March 24, 1884, at Maastricht, the Netherlands. He received his early education at the elementary and secondary schools in his home town and from then on his life has been devoted to a search for knowledge. He continued his studies at the Aachen Institute of Technology (Technische Hochschule)…

Kurt Alder was born in Königshütte, Upper Silesia, on the 10th of July 1902. His childhood and school years were spent in these industrial surroundings, but after the end of the First World War he was forced to leave his home, due to political circumstances. He started reading chemistry at Berlin University in 1922, and…

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Presentation Speech by Professor Björn Roos of the , December 10, 1998. Translation of the Swedish text. Professor Björn Roos delivering the Presentation Speech for the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry at the Stockholm Concert Hall. Photo: Hans Mehlin, Nobelprize.org   Your Majesties, Your Royal Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen, Man is fantastic. Through his studies…

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008 In the 1960s, when the Japanese scientist Osamu Shimomura began to study the bioluminescent jellyfish Aequorea victoria, he had no idea what a scientific revolution it would lead to. Thirty years later, Martin Chalfie used the jellyfish’s green fluorescent protein to help him study life’s smallest building block, the…

  The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003           Peter Agre Peter Agre is Professor of Biological Chemistry and Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, USA.   Water channels: The cell leaks like a sieve     How does water actually pass through the cell membrane? The…